Prof. Dr. Sigrid G. Köhler

For several years now, 'belonging' has been developing into a new paradigm in social and cultural science research. The added value of the concept lies in being able to grasp and describe non/belonging where concepts and ideas of (collective) 'identity' remain ambiguous or have the tendency to (re)produce categorical essentialisms. 
The contributions in this special section are devoted to different thematic negotiations of non/belonging in contemporary Namibian, German and French literature and culture. What they have in common is that they take up the current debates on national belonging, discrimination and racism as well as colonial history and diversity of remembrance and follow their processing in contemporary literature and music.
Published 2023 by Peter Lang
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Forthcoming:

The boom of the contract is evident interdiscursively in law, philosophy, politics and literature and culminates around 1800 in a comprehensive presence in non-juridical areas as well: Communication and intersubjectivity are conceptualized contractually, aesthetic, political and historical societies are designed by Friedrich Schiller according to the 'model of the covenant' and characters in love in Goethe's Elective Affinities dream of the contract rather than a night of love. Sigrid G. Köhler traces this boom from a literary and cultural studies perspective. She examines texts from the classical and romantic periods, from Friedrich Schiller's letters on the aesthetic education of man to Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas and Ludwig Uhland's Vaterländische Gedichte, supplemented by relevant early modern and enlightenment positions on natural law, including Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as early modern sociological writings by Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. The focus is on the formation of the modern bourgeois subject. Its idea of being free and self-determined is expressed not least in the autonomy of action granted by the contract. The contract - as a figure of private law enabling, as a figure of state regulation and as a figure of transcendence - allows modern man to order his own (legal) space in the state. To be published in 2024 by Konstanz University Press.

In the linking of law with technologies of culture, this interdisciplinary volume pursues a dual perspective: It considers both the medial and material environment in and out of which law emerges while also investigating how ‘law as a technology of culture’ shapes its sociocultural surroundings. Law, as a particular interconnection of material, medial, and intellectual technologies of culture, generates both a juridical normativity and, at the same time, fashions subjects. This formation occurs as a result of law creating relationships and regulating societies as well through its forming of networks of affect not only through legal proceedings, but also in literature, cultural practices and film. The contributions from literary, media, legal studies inquire into the connection between legal subjectivity and technologies of culture, the legal strategies of (anti)colonialism and the legal cultural technologies in the digital present. Available in November 2023 at Brill.